“Trust starts with truth and ends with truth.” – Santosh Kalwar Trust is in short supply today. The lack of public trust in governments, institutions, and private companies is taking its toll on society in increasingly costly ways. In many cases, this erosion of trust hinges squarely on technological shortcomings and a distinct lack of…

Centralized services like Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo keep all your eggs in one basket. This means that bad actors only need to attack one weak link to compromise all your data. And there are many ways to do it, including DDoS, Man-in-the-Middle, and credential stealing to name a few. Decentralized services keep your data safe and secure by distributing it across many redundant servers with cutting-edge cryptography that ensures your data is complete, immutable, and incorruptible. Of course, there are many degrees of decentralization. In this article, we explore the varieties of decentralization, their history and evolution, and the benefits each decentralized consensus algorithm has to offer your business, NGO, or non-profit.

In the early days of crypto, privacy was a critical focus in blockchain development but difficult for the average user to achieve. From 2011–2014, creating multi-signature transactions was considered a cutting-edge technique that provided advanced users more privacy and security than executing standard peer-to-peer transactions alone. Now multisig is standard and more user friendly than ever. So, what’s changed in the last 5 years? And when can we expect blockchains to deliver practical privacy for non-technical users and businesses?